Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Modern Christian Life and the Myth of Moral Progress

I have been following with
great interest the discussion initiated by Fr. Stephen Freeman on his blog
‘Glory to God’ on the topic of moral progress (http://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2014/12/05/youre-not-better/, and others). Taken at face value, I have found his
engagement on this issue to be profoundly helpful, until I realize that his
perspective, if true, overturns the entire way I have understood my Christian
life – at least my pre-Orthodox Christian life.
Like any revolution, this is both exhilarating and deeply unsettling.

Fr. Stephen’s contention
is that Christianity in general, and the Christian life in particular is not a
moral project. The gospel is not about
taking bad people and making them good, or at least better. Now, maybe I misunderstood things when I was
growing up, and then when I was a Christian leader at university, and then a
seminary student, and then a pastor and a missionary and seminary teacher, but
along with the emphasis on God’s grace (if mercy is God not giving to me what I
deserve, grace is God giving to me what I don’t deserve), came the assumption
that the Christian life (the life of discipleship, the Spirit-filled life,
however it is described) was a matter of progressively laying aside sin and
becoming more and more like Christ.
This, of course, was done, not as a quid
pro quo, but out of ‘gratitude,’ so we were taught. So while there was the constant note of
‘grace’ being sounded from the pulpits and Bible studies and in our pious
books, there was the equally strong insistence that our ‘salvation’ be matched
by lives that looked saved. But because
of our inherited allergic reaction to all things Roman Catholic, this could
never be understood as ‘salvation by works’; we were, after all, ‘saved by
grace through faith’, regardless of what James had to say in the second chapter
of his letter.

Amongst many
Fundamentalists and Pentecostals, this insistence on a requisite and subsequent
holiness was overt, in that there were certain behaviors that the ‘saved’ simply
did not do, like drink or dance or play cards or be caught unchaperoned with a
person of the opposite sex, among other things.
We Evangelicals thought we did better by getting rid of the overt
‘legalism’ of our Fundamentalist cousins, but the insistence that we progress
in Christ (I think ‘grow’ was the operative term) was just as strong. This might be seen in our insistence on a
morning quiet time, or on Scripture memory, or on ‘doing’ evangelism or helping
at the soup kitchen. We were told that
we must be ‘pure’ and chaste when it came to our sexual lives. Our marriages were supposed to be strong and
getting better. Our children were to be
disciplined ‘in the Lord’ and be Eagle Scout material, or at least, like Lake
Woebegone’s young people, all above average.

I can only speak for myself. The great dissonance of my Christian life is
that I have not experienced any of the moral progress that I was told
Christianity was meant to facilitate. I
am not a better person than I was when I ‘accepted Jesus as my Savior and Lord’
as a fourteen-year-old. And in most
aspects, I am worse. All of the sins
that I struggled with as a teenager are still besetting sins. Not only that, I’ve discovered a whole raft
of new sins that weren’t a part of my portfolio when I started out on this
pilgrimage. What the hell is going on!? I
have no excuses. I can’t claim
ignorance. I was Evangelicalism’s poster
child in terms of opportunity. I had access to the best Evangelical training,
the best teaching, the most awesome associations. But day after day after day, when the sun
went down, I was still very much the same person that watched the sun come up
that morning.

I was in denial about this
discrepancy for decades. I bought into
what turned out to be a spiritual Ponzi scheme: keep bringing more and more
people into the church through our ‘evangelism’ and we will appear to be ‘growing’,
while pretty much everyone else who has been around for a while is still
working on the same old issues. I myself
really believed I was a blessed somebody.
But with increasing clarity, I have noted with dismay just how far short
I have fallen. With pain I recount how I
have walked through a series of overwhelmingly challenging circumstances, none
of which have brought out me at my best but rather displayed me at my worst. As a Protestant, I was supposed to celebrate
the light of salvation, preach and teach the light of salvation, live the light
of salvation. But in my own life the
long dark night never gave way to a dawn; just to more of the same. The closest I ever came to finding relief was
from the old DC Talk chorus from their song ‘In the Light’:

‘What’s going
on inside of me?

I despise my
own behavior.

This only
serves to confirm my suspicions,

That I’m
still a man in need of a Savior’

But I thought I was ‘saved’! It was one thing to struggle with this sin
and that sin as a teenager. But to still
be struggling in my twenties just did not seem right. And when my thirties and my forties found me
in the pulpit passing on to congregations everything I had been taught about
grace and sanctification but finding myself unable to live it, this I found not
just embarrassing, but deeply disorienting as well. And it wasn’t like I was leading a double
life – I was constantly reaching out to friends and colleagues around me,
constantly trying to be vulnerable about what I was experiencing, constantly
sharing with my spouse and friends what was going on. But nobody had any answer, other than to
leave me with the vague sense that the problem was with me, that if I was just this or that, or if I just got my act
together, I could get back on the escalator of sanctification. I understand their frustration with me. They were all playing with the same hand I
was dealt. It’s one thing to listen to
someone, to share your own helpful perspective, and then see that person go on
to experience ‘victory in Christ’. But
when that person just keeps dealing with variations of the same thing for years, even decades, well, what can you do?
Maybe, surely, it’s their fault? Or maybe
your answers don’t actually work.

I had come to the
conclusion in 2008 that my long-held, long-believed, long-preached and taught
Protestant theology of salvation simply was not working. It no longer made sense. It seemed wholly different in emphasis from
what I was reading in the New Testament.
According to my own received theology, I was a serial backslider. It was a cycle that simply went round and
round. And I was a part of that section
of Christianity that worked very hard to determine what bad sins excluded one
from the party and what other ones could be ignored or redefined as being not
sinful after all. The focus was on what
pleased God (i.e. keeping God’s law), and thus whether or not one was in the
right or in the wrong. And I kept
finding myself in the wrong – in my thought life, in my war with lust, in my
marriage. And after having tried every
variation I could think of, and every suggestion from all the Evangelical
Christian life books that I had devoured, prayed every prayer, started multiple
accountability groups, I determined that I must be self-deluded, and that a
wrathful God was about to call in the chips, that I was about to find myself attempting
entry to the wedding feast in the wrong clothes. And we know how that story ended.

from Martin's Doodles

It was the constant zig
zag in and out of condemnation, in and out of forgiveness, that I found
untenable. With the Western churches’ emphasis
on a just God and our need for salvation explained and resolved forensically,
the ‘Gospel’ made sense for someone who was initially ‘coming to Christ’ and ‘repenting’
and asking God for forgiveness. Such a
person is received by God just as he or she is.
Sins are forgiven, Christ’s righteousness replaces every deficit, heaven
replaces hell as the final destination.
But what if the said ‘saved’ person continues to struggle with sin,
continues to ‘backslide’ (a term usually applied to ‘major’ sins, usually of the
flesh), continues repent and ask forgiveness?
What if this just keeps going on year after year? Is this person saved? What sort of ‘salvation’ can this possibly
be?

When I discovered Orthodoxy,
I didn’t just discover a variation on this way of doing salvation and the
Christian life and Christian theology; I found a different way of understanding
the Gospel and our response entirely. Salvation
is not about having my sins forgiven, being on God’s right side, about having my legal issues before a holy God happily resolved and thus
getting into heaven. Salvation is not
about me becoming a better person, a holy person, a person who can finally keep
God’s law. Instead, salvation comes to
all who know they fall short, who know their choices have alienated them from
God and from the people around them, who call out for mercy, who are met as the
returning prodigal is met by the running Father.

Salvation, in the Eastern Churches,
is repentance, that posture and action prompted by seeing ourselves as we
really are, crying out for the mercy from God without which we will surely
perish, turning from those ways and thoughts that have so mangled us and
pleading with God for healing. And God
surely receives and forgives and heals.
Salvation is also the reconciliation and restoration that occurs in our
relationships, with God and with all those around us, especially those we have
hurt. God invites us to participate in
the love of the Holy Trinity itself, to receive love and to give love. It is a different way of seeing, of living,
of being that we are invited into, and we find ourselves part of the
transformation that God is recreating all around us. God the Holy Trinity loves us
profoundly. And our response is not
intended to be, ‘Ok, now keep God’s law!
Become a better person! Become a
holy person!’ Instead, the response that
God’s love invites is love itself. God
saves us in love, by love so that we might share this love and love Him and
those around us. Jesus himself, when
asked what the most important law was, said ‘Love the Lord your God with all
your heart and all your mind and all your strength and all your soul. And love your neighbor as yourself.’ And now we know how – just as Jesus as loved
us. But salvation will also be our
deliverance from death and everything that means in our own lives and in this sin-blighted
world of ours. We were created for
paradise, with spirits like the angels and bodies for living in this material
world. But instead we have inherited
brokenness, catastrophe, sickness, death and decay – all consequences of our
choice not to love. After His
crucifixion and death, Jesus broke its power by His divinity, and raised His
humanity to transfigured new life, the first fruits of what God intends for all
humanity. We, too, will be set free from
death’s power, from decay’s stench, from the moldering dust of lives long
forgotten. All of us will experience the
power of God, this miracle of God, which will touch each of us in the most
personal, intimate way – you and I will be saved from death and all that it has
ever done to us. And every tear will be
dried.

Thus my invitation into Orthodoxy
was an invitation into love, to receive love from a God who doesn’t stand in
threatening judgment over me, to receive a love that unworks the damage I’ve
done to myself through my disordered thinking and living and that others have
done to me, a love that brings healing, and a love that then calls from me a
love in return – loving God who so loves me, loving my neighbor who I see every
day, and even loving my enemy who may not deserve it, but who will be loved
anyway because I recall that I could not earn such love as this either.

After all the fear, all
the guilt, all the condemnation, all the rejection I received and felt,
especially in these later years when I began to grapple in earnest with my own
brokenness, the Gospel I heard from the Orthodox people I began to know was
something different from what I had experienced previously. It got my attention. It startled me. It made me wonder why I hadn’t been told this
before.

I certainly blame no one
but myself for what I experienced in my 50 years in Protestant churches. All of the people I interacted with and
worked with for all of those years were just like me, doing the best we could
with what we knew. If anyone else was
struggling with being a sinner, I was all the more, and so I am in no position
to condemn anyone. I can only hope that
they too can enter more fully into what I have begun to taste and see, namely
that the Lord is good, and that His mercy endures forever.

A couple of years ago, I
had been kicked out of my house by my wife.
Obviously things between us were not good. We were missionaries at the time, teachers at different theological colleges. I hardly
knew what to do or where to go. I was
too ashamed to ask friends to take me in.
I was also afraid that if word got out that my wife was now separated,
her mission (the one that had already dismissed me for becoming Orthodox) might
do the same to her. In desperation I
went to the Roman Catholics and was told there was a monastery about 5 miles
from the university where I taught. And
when I went there and explained what my situation was to the brother in charge,
he took me in. I lived at that monastery
for nearly 4 months. I didn’t tell
anyone that I was separated, out of fear, out of shame. Finally, I had arranged to invite my priest who was also my spiritual father to visit the several Orthodox priests who were students where I taught. We both had been very busy, and I had not
been able to tell him what was going on in my life. After he finished having tea with the
students, I showed him around and then, as we were walking to the car, I told
him about my separation. I told him that
I didn’t think I should be singing in the choir, or serving as a Reader in the
Church. I would instead just stand in
the back, if he felt that was the best thing.
At this, the Father stopped me and looked at me and simply said, ‘We
Orthodox, we struggle together.’ I
believe this is the most healing thing anybody has said to me ever.

Before I felt trapped in a
ministry of condemnation. Today I have
hope. Before, my closest relationships
and associations judged me on the basis of what I did or didn’t do. Today I am learning what love really is. Before, I spiraled repeatedly into depression
and could not understand what was going on inside of me. Today, God is working his healing, bringing
His perspective to bear on my life and my heart. Before I was riding on a never-ending
escalator, ever upwards in an attempt to grow in holiness, get better, live the
‘Christian life’. Now I understand that
what God wants from me is not my perfection but my repentance.

As Christos Yannaras
writes,

Those who have trusted in ‘themselves that they were
righteous’ (Luke 18:9) exclude themselves from the Kingdom. They themselves have shut themselves out of
the wedding-feast and remained content with their virtues, with the self-satisfaction
afforded by their moral attainments.
They have no need for God except to reward their individual performance. This is why the Pharisee who keeps the Law
faithfully, is not justified before God, even though he is ‘not as other men
are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers,’ but indeed ‘fasts twice in the week,
and gives tithes of all that he possesses’; for he does not justify his existence
as a personal fact of communion and relationship with God, beyond corruption
and death. The Publican weighed down as
he is by a multitude of sins, is justified because he feels his own inadequacy
as an individual and seeks God’s mercy, that is to say participation in the
life that is grace, a gift of love (Luke 18:10-14). (ChristosYannaras, The Freedom of Morality, 59)

I struggled for decades as
a Christian because I was given the very strong impression by friends,
colleagues and leaders that my salvation would be matched (verified) by my
progressive sanctification. But nobody
could say how sanctified I needed to be in order to be sanctified enough. And nobody was willing to make the connection
between this and being saved by works, because we all knew that we couldn’t be
saved by works – that was a Catholic error.
So we all found ourselves on the ramp of moral progress, or ‘spiritual
growth’, where we were to become more like Jesus. I can’t speak for anybody else, but I was never
in danger of becoming like Jesus, and I suspect that the same
is true for just about everybody else I know.
We all get by because we either lower the standards, or ignore them – but who
gives us the authority to do either? Or we're simply deluded. So
a Christianity, a salvation that leads to the necessity of moral progress is a perversion of the
gospel. Jesus did not come to make us better.
And if He did, then, um, it didn’t work.

Instead, the mountains and
hills are made low. The first made last,
and the last first. Undone publicans
find God’s mercy and the religious professional leaves with only her/his
self-righteousness. It’s the sick who
need a physician, not the ‘healthy.’